CHELTENHAM — A four-alarm fire displaced dozens of residents at the 1600 Church Road condominium complex in the township Friday night.

Five people had to be rescued from the B building where the fire broke out, according to Glenside Fire Company Chief Joe Stuckert.

“We had to rescue some off balconies in the back of the building,” Stuckert said. Inside, “some were working their way out but had become disoriented.”

Seven people were sent to the hospital, two of them firefighters, all with non-life-threatening injuries, he said.

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The call of a third-floor building fire came in at 9:23 p.m. Friday as a stove fire, said Stuckert, whose company was first on the scene. The fire was quickly upgraded to a second, then a third and fourth alarm, he said.

The cause of the fire was still under investigation Saturday.

Stuckert estimated 20 to 25 fire companies and 125 firefighters responded to the scene of the fire, which took about four hours to extinguish.

“We had some trouble when the roof collapsed,” he said, referring to the roof on the left side of building B.

All the power and gas had been shut off to the entire four-building complex, each of which has 50 to 55 units, and all residents had been evacuated, he said Saturday morning. The Red Cross set up a shelter at Cheltenham High School and would be trying to find places for people who had no place to stay, he said.

Matthew Pellgrini, an owner of a condo on the first floor of the B building, was on the scene Saturday morning, hoping to find out when he could get back into his condo to get some things and assess the damage. He had taken his two cats when he left but his pet snake was still inside in an aquarium, he said.

A staff member at Arcadia University, he said he was able to stay in a guest apartment Friday night and was hoping his insurance would pay for a hotel until he could get back into his unit.

“A good portion of the third floor was wiped out, and the second floor had water damage, and possibly damage from the roof,” when it caved in, he said, adding he believed “the first floor was heavily water damaged.”

The fire alarm which sounds in the hallways of the building often goes off, so he didn’t go outside when he first heard it, Pellgrini said; “I didn’t believe it.”

“People were out in the lot yelling that it was an actual fire, but about 25 minutes after it started some were still inside,” Pellgrini said.

Once outside, “it looked like was contained to one unit, but it kept pushing,” he said.

B building resident Sylvia Barrett, who was at the scene Saturday morning, also said the fire alarm goes off a lot, but “I always walk down.”

Noting her third-floor unit is next door to one where the windows were knocked out, she said she was good friends with her neighbor who “was beside herself,” but had left when her daughter came to get her.

Barrett said she was able to move her car initially and had spent the night with a cousin, who heard about the fire and came to get her. She said she would be able to stay with her sister until she could get back into her unit.

“This is unbelievable,” she said. “I kept thinking they would put it out and it would be contained to that end, but it kept going on and on.”